Category Archives: Voting Rights

This is the 8th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in Louisiana. What has happened since then. Are we better off? How are we still being failed? What needs to improve?

The Obama Administration is currently weighing our options after evidence points to Syria using illegal chemical weapons against the rebels. Do we need to get involved? Is this our problem or the worlds problem? Should we be more patient? Will anything this President does be considered correct by Republicans? Are there other reasons why we care about what is going on in Syria while ignoring other massacres around the world (i.e. Africa)?

Finally, this week marks the 50th anniversary of the Martin Luther King speech at the march on Washington. Conservatives are complaining that more conservative folks were not invited. Republicans like to say that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican himself. I will go into why the Conservatives and the Republican Party needs to clean up some of their behavior before complaining about a lack of inclusion in the festivities.

Those topics, headlines, tweet of the week and more, tonight on Liberal Dan Radio: Talk From The Left, That’s Right.

Remember, the show is moving to Wednesdays starting next week.

And remember, there are two more days left until the end of the Liberal Dan Radio Kickstarter. Great deals are there for potential advertisers. Listeners can also help for as little as $1. So act fast and help me expand Liberal Dan Radio.

Jeffrey Skilling, former Enron executive, was given a reduced sentence last week. You won’t believe why.

A huge week for the Supreme Court this week. I will go into the issues of voting rights and marriage equality and point out the highs and lows of this week’s rulings.

Also, I will be discussing the line item vetos that Louisiana Governor Jindal made to cut needed funding from Louisiana’s children with special needs. On the show I will have activists from the grassroots organization Override The Veto.

Those issues, headlines, words of redneck wisdom, tweet of the week and more, this week on Liberal Dan Radio: Talk from the left, that’s right.

Voter disenfranchisement in Louisiana. The election to overturn the toll renewal in New Orleans is being thrown out because of some issues with the provisional ballots. See why the the ruling is trampling voter rights and is par for the course for Conservatives across this country.

New York’s soft drink law was thrown out. Why should it have existed in the first place and how has Mississippi gone completely off the wall in making an “Anti-Bloomberg” law and why is that similar to what is being asked of the FDA?

Those topics and more on Liberal Dan Radio: Talk from the left, that’s right.

In a previous post I had stated I was glad that the judge ruled against the tolls because it would give people time to see how life without the tolls would be. This would at least paint a partial picture so people could get a more informed view of the results of having no tolls on the bridge.

However, as I have had time to think about the results, the problems of having this “re-vote” are becoming more and more apparent and the attitudes of many of the anti-toll activists are shining through as clear as day.

Well this isn’t Rocky II nor is this about maintaining election integrity. This is about the “no tolls” faction making sure that their side wins no matter what. It is about the ends justifying the means. It is about “stop the tolls” making sure as FEW people vote on this proposal as possible. When they couldn’t win convincingly at the polls, the group pushed to disenfranchise the thousands of voters who cast a valid ballot for the hundreds of voters who turned in a legal provisional ballot but were not able to cast a vote on the toll issue.

Let’s be very clear. People who were unable to vote should be allowed to vote. Louisiana law allows for this remedy without tossing out the legally cast ballots of others. The same statute used by the judge in this case to call a re-vote also allows a call for a “restricted election” where only certain voters are allowed to vote. If the stop the tolls organization really wanted to maintain the integrity of the election and make sure that as many legally cast ballots were counted, they would have pushed for this remedy and not for the remedy that throws out thousands of legally cast ballots.

However, with the exception of one very loud liberal friend of mine, most of the people who I have met who oppose the tolls are Conservatives. They are the kind of people who think that winning at all costs is OK. Their mindset in this election is like the PA GOP who gerrymandered districts because they won state elections in 2010. Their mindset is like the Republicans in other states that want to make it so that the winner of a state’s popular vote could get less than half of the electoral college votes. To them, the ends justify the means. To me, they do not.

Thousands of people should not be asked to vote twice in order for hundreds to vote once. Just allow everyone to cast a vote once, count the votes, and let the election results speak for themselves. If at the end of the day those voters care enough about the issue and they come out in opposition to the tolls and they lose, then so be it. They will be gone. But the possibility exists that even if none of those provisional voters come out on May 4th that the election could still be overturned. How on earth is that “fair”? How on earth is that maintaining the “integrity” of the election?